The Initial Profession of the Monastic Vow of Br. Jacob Anthony Letchworth, OHC - February 18, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josep Martinez-Cubero

The Initial Profession of the Monastic Vow of Br. Jacob Anthony Lecthworth OHC, February 18, 2025

• 1 Samuel 3:1-11      
• 1 Corinthians 1:22-31      
• Matthew 6:24-27

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

I want to first, on behalf of the monastic community, welcome all of you who have come for this joyous occasion. Thank you for being with us. Anthony has been here at the monastery answering a call- trying his vocation, a word that comes from the Latin ‘vocatio’, a calling- a strong urge toward a particular way of life or career. For us monastics, a vocation is not just something that God calls us to do, it is also what God calls us to be. When people inquiring about monastic life say to me: “I’m feeling called to monastic life and I’m not sure if I should maybe discern a vocation,” my response is always: YES, followed by what was said to me by our late Brother Andrew when I started inquiring about the life: “If you have a vocation, in other words, if you are being called by God, that call will never go away. You might as well pursue it.” We can choose to answer the call or not. But that phone in our heart keeps ringing, and that phone has no voicemail or answering service. I’m sure some of us still remember what it feels like to hear a phone’s relentless ring when it is not answered (although I think today God just keeps sending text messages). 

In our first lesson, Samuel, is a boy who lives and works in the temple during a period when the religion of Israel had become dry. One night God calls to Samuel. He thinks it's the old priest Eli. This happens three times before Eli finally realizes that God, who hasn't spoken much to the people lately, is speaking to this boy. He tells Samuel to listen and obey when the voice speaks again. When Samuel finally responds to God instead of Eli, God tells him of plans to punish Eli’s family because of the iniquity of his sons. There is no task given, and no clarity. In other words, listening and obeying does not exempt us from life with all its joys and complications and struggles.

One of life’s biggest challenges is coping with uncertainty. Circumstances are always changing around us, and often in very unexpected ways. In fact, change is certainly one of life’s few guarantees. No matter how much we plan for the future there is actually little that we can know for sure about what will happen. Learning how to accept not knowing is one of the keys to spiritual health. Afterall, as Jesus tells us in the Gospel lesson today, by worrying, we cannot add a single hour to the span of our lives. Optimism and hope are absolutely important, but very often resilience and fortitude count much more.

So, dear Anthony, here you are- at a gate. You have not made it. You have not arrived. You are about to begin. Today you join the rest of your professed brothers on a pilgrimage. It is a wonderful journey of self-knowledge that will draw you deeper into the mystery that is God. The postulancy and novitiate periods have given you the map and have led you to the threshold. You are a hiker, so you know that often on a journey we encounter detours and turns that don’t appear on the map. We may journey through beautiful mossy brooks, grassy fern covered grounds, waterfalls, and incredible vistas. We may also encounter rocky climbs and muddy swamps. We may get off the path and have to find our way back to the trail. Getting upset and disheartened does not change the situation, and when we pray to God, the answer is usually, “I’m with you. Go ahead!” Accepting what is with resilience and fortitude is what helps us get to the other side, and we can do so while still enjoying all the beauty around us.

In a few moments, you will profess and sign the threefold Benedictine vow of stability, conversion of your ways to the monastic way of life, and obedience. The vow names the core Benedictine values of not running away when the going gets tough, being open to change and transformation, and listening intently and responding with your heart. 

Monastic stability means accepting this particular community and Order as our way to God. For Saint Benedict, community is not just the place where we seek God, but the very means by which we find God. Living in community is not simply about cohabitating. On the hand, it is not about being fused in unhealthy ways either. Healthy community living involves being self-differentiated as we strive to stay connected. By vowing stability, we commit ourselves to facing the difficult times of our vocation without running away. Instead, we rely on the support of the community to carry us through. As our Brother Randy has said: “Crisis is often a prelude to some kind of deeper growth.”

Conversion of our ways to the monastic way of life calls for continuous transformation into Christ. Among other things, it challenges us to reevaluate our relationship with worldly possessions by holding all things in common. In a capitalist and consumerist society, we have become so attached to things, possessions have become our idols. In today’s Gospel reading Jesus reminds us that we cannot serve God and mammon. So, conversion to the monastic way of life encourages us to trust that our needs will be met. And when our wants are not met, we can say with Blessed Mary: “Here I am, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your will.”

As monks we are always in a state of becoming and encountering our need for conversion at deeper and deeper levels. Through ongoing conversion, we shed away the layers of defense we have built around us in order to cope with a world that sometimes seems anything but loving. Vulnerability is the key to ongoing conversion and growth. Trusting our Brothers and constantly opening ourselves to them is a vulnerable choice because it means that we will inevitably get hurt by them at times. The good news, though, is that the opposite is also true. In community we can experience love at a deep, soulful and trusting level. 

And finally, obedience- easy to talk about and very difficult to live out. It is perhaps the hardest part of the monastic vow because refusing to obey challenges our stability in the community and in the order and hinders our conversion to the monastic way of life. It is not about mindlessly conforming and complying. On the other hand, it is not just about listening. The idea that obedience is just about listening implies that, yes, I will listen to what my superior, the Order’s council, or the community is saying. I will consider it, and if I agree I will obey. If I don’t agree, I may engage in all manner of passive-aggressive behavior, grumbling and murmuring, or plainly decide not to obey. That is not monastic obedience.

Monastic obedience involves giving our hearts to what we have heard. Like every other aspect of our life, it involves discernment and prayer. Through discernment, we strive to hear God’s voice manifested in the practices of the community and the requests of those in authority. Prayer leads us to a spirit of respect and charity toward others. No leadership role in this order is a “power” position, but a “servant” position. Even when dialogue, communal consideration, or expert advice are necessary, we respond to those in authority with cooperation so they can fulfill their leadership role with dignity and integrity. This kind of deep listening and cooperation is only possible when we do it from a place of love. It is love that opens us to hearing the voice of God in our fallible Brothers.

Anthony, you came to this monastery with a deep, deep longing for God. That longing is manifested by your great capacity for love, and your willingness to receive love. It is manifested in your love for our liturgy and communal prayer, your concern for the welfare of others, your willingness to lend a hand when needed, your devotion to your various tasks, and your love for community life. You have shown incredible conscientiousness by deeply listening and reflecting on what you hear with openness and humility. It has been a great joy and privilege to accompany you on your discernment for the past three years, first as an inquirer and aspirant, and then as a postulant and novice, and to have witnessed your transformation day by day. There is much more to come, and I’m looking forward to experiencing it with you, no longer as your formator, but as your fellow Brother. I love you. We all love you and wish you every blessing in your vocation. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany C, February 16, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 16, 2025

 

Jeremiah 17:5-10

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Luke 6:17-26    

This morning preachers can hardly avoid noting the jarring differences between the Beatitudes that we have come to know and love from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew given as Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount and those that we hear this morning from Saint Luke’ Gospel. The former are familiar and warm or, at the very least, reassuring. But this morning's version is more concise and, in its way, more disturbing. Jesus, teaching from the Plain or on the level place, levels with us not only in describing who is blessed but also those who are or will be facing great woe. 

It's important to understand that these are not primarily blessings and curses. They are rather a description of the deeper reality of things and people, whether we are talking about individuals or societies, nations or cultures. They are prophetic in both senses of that term. They reveal what is in fact now the deep truth and what will be further revealed in the fullness of time, when God's reign is finally and fully established in our created order. And of that, most of us have only caught glimpses, fleeting but nevertheless life giving.

We gathered here this morning are likely numbered among those who are rich and full and filled with mirth and laughter and spoken well of.  And to us, Jesus’ words are disturbing. They are probably meant to be. On the other hand, for those millions who are numbered among the poor, the hungry, the desolate, the excluded, or those reviled for the sake of Christ, these words come as liberation and consolation and promise.

The Beatitudes, whether from Matthew’s version or Luke’s, are explicitly laid out in binary form. They describe two large categories of people or institutions or structures or ways of living. We are increasingly uncomfortable with binary thinking and often for very good reasons. But in the scriptures, particularly in those books which are classified as wisdom literature--think of the psalms for example or the Book of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes--there are only two paths, two ways forward, though they are usually described in quite general terms. They are the way wise versus the way of the foolish. Or the way of the righteous versus that of the wicked. Or that way that leads to fullness of life versus that which leads to a death.

In today's Old Testament lesson the prophet  Jeremiah introduces these binary categories in powerful language:

“Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.”

In contrast, there are those who trust in the Lord and not merely in their own strength:

“Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought, it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”

The image offered us of the blessed, the happy, likens them to trees deeply rooted in ultimate reality. They are grounded.  And no matter what happens around them, they can tap into hidden life-giving streams that will see them through the vicissitudes of life. Whereas those who trust in their own strength or in the strength of others and not in God have no such deep root and cannot withstand the recurring heat and dryness of human living.

Psalm 1, the lectionary psalm appointed for today, repeats this same imagery. In fact, biblical scholars aren't sure if Jeremiah was borrowing from the psalm or the Psalmist was borrowing from Jeremiah.  It's a  psalm well worth memorizing. In six short verses it contrasts the way of those who are happy and who delight in the Lord’s law with those who are wicked and whose way is doomed. The same illustrations are served up: of the righteous who are like trees planted by streams of water  “…bearing fruit in due season with leaves that do not wither” and of the wicked who are “like chaff which the wind blows away.”  Admittedly none of this is readily apparent in our lives or the lives of others. But it is a claim upon a deeper, if hidden, truth which we need to embrace.

Our Christian tradition offers us resources that assist us both to know concretely which way to follow in our lives along with practical wisdom and techniques , if you will, on how to do it or to do it better. There is for example sacred scripture itself. There is the guidance of God's Spirit active throughout creation and in our own hearts. There is the fellowship of the saints and ancestors and the tradition of their counsels. There is the community of believers that we call church and the precious gift of human reason. And there is the practice of virtue. All of these help us to distinguish the path that leads to life from the path which leads to a dead end. And they empower us to choose and walk that right path.   

But there's a catch, as there so often is, and it's the catch which Jeremiah names as he concludes his description of the cursed and the blessed. They are words that are all too true as we know from experience: “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse--who can understand it?” The devious heart refers here, I believe, to the amazing and persistent ability we have to deceive ourselves or to let ourselves be deceived by others both as individuals and as nations and peoples. As Psalm 64 says: “The human mind and heart are a mystery.”   

I came of age in the 1960s and 1970s where there was a growing emphasis on complete self-transparency (“Let it all hang out”), absolute clarity, and ideological certitude. We made and continue to make an idol of self-knowledge.  Therapy, forms of therapeutic religion, even spiritual direction and practices of discernment have been presented to us, wrongly, as roads to clearness and certitude. I’m not saying that these practices are wrong; each of these disciplines, if used rightly, is useful in attaining greater transparency, greater clarity, and a certain manageable certitude.  But we will never know ourselves fully in this life even as we must strive toward it. Full knowledge is a matter for the heavenly vision given to us in part now but not yet in its fullness.

           The Jesuit priest, philosopher and author John Kavanaugh once asked Mother Teresa to pray for him to have clarity. She responded, “I've never had clarity and certitude. I only have trust. I'll pray that you trust.”  Even that great master of spiritual discernment, Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, said that in our discerning the most we could hope for is some degree of clarity, one that philosophers call moral certitude, by which they mean adequate evidence to act upon, but rarely if ever absolute certainty or clarity. As Jeremiah said: the heart is devious. Or as the psalmist said, it is a mystery, and we can never totally unpack it.

I remember reading an excerpt from Gateway to Hope by Sister Maria Boulding, an English Benedictine nun, which drove this point home. There she said: “We are more sinful than we know, more deeply flawed than we can recognize by any human insight; but grace works in us in the deepest places of body and spirit. We must live from our weakness, from the barren places of our need, because there is the spring of grace and the source of our strength…. When we can stand before God in the truth of our need, acknowledging our sinfulness and bankruptcy, then we can celebrate [God’s] mercy. Then we are living by grace, and we can allow full scope to his joy.”

The key to all of this is trust. To trust not in our own strength or in the strength of other mortals or in systems or kingdoms or governments, but in God. Again, as Mother Teresa reminds us: “I only have trust. I'll pray that you trust.”  At its heart and in the end, our faith is not about propositions or doctrines or creeds, though they have a role to play. Faith is trust in a God who is no less than personal  and who is eternally disposed toward us in love. And with whom we can be in relation.  More accurately, with whom we are already and always in relation, whether we know it or not.

As we offer our gifts and ourselves at the altar this morning, we will sing Hymn 635. I find the hymn tune lugubrious and its tone very Germanic, but its words are to me words of life:

If thou but trust in God to guide thee,

and hope in him through all thy ways,

he'll give thee strength with ere betide thee,

and bear thee through the evil days.

Who trusts in God's unchanging love

builds on a rock that nought can move.

 May this hymn be our prayer today whatever our faith or doubts, certainties or uncertainties might be. Let us trust the One who is both Rock and Refuge. The One who is Love itself. The One revealed to us in our Brother Jesus Christ…may His Name be praised. Amen.

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany C, February 9, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 9, 2025

• Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13]
• 1 Corinthians 15:1-11
• Luke 5:1-11

This morning’s readings are full of sinful men. And so, I would imagine, is this church. Maybe even some sinful women and nonbinary people, too. In the lectionary we have Isaiah, the man of unclean lips; Paul, the last of the apostles and one untimely born; and, of course, Peter, who begs the Lord to go away from him. 

This latter is such a human reaction and one I bet we can all relate to. Grace and mercy tend to overwhelm us. An encounter with the full wattage of God’s love for us is, simultaneously, an encounter with our own abject poverty. In such circumstances, we may easily find ourselves, like Peter, begging that God would leave us alone. Sometimes our own smallness can be too much to bear. 

There are times when this reaction arises from compunction, which the early monastics called “the wound that leads to life.” Compunction is the understanding that all our striving will avail us nothing. That, hard as we have worked to save ourselves, we have utterly failed. But that God’s mercy has never left us, that what Peter asks is impossible—God can never go away from us, loving us as he does. Compunction sometimes appears as repentance for sin, sometimes as the sudden awareness of our own smallness in the face of beauty or love. It usually hits suddenly, the face of God unveiling itself in an apocalypse of love. 

But sometimes our diffidence in the face of God’s mercy is not compunction at all, but shame and its constant companion, fear. Shame is the conviction that who we are is wrong and that, because of our fundamental brokenness, we are beyond the reach of God’s loving mercy. Shame carries with it the fear that God will do just what Peter asks, so why not push God away first? If compunction is the wound that leads to life, then shame is the seed of despair, and ultimately it can and will kill us. 

Although it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between these two experiences, we know them by their fruits. Compunction always leads to greater freedom to love and to act without self-reference or clinging. It is what leads us to lose our lives for the sake of the Gospel of Love. Shame only leads us deeper into the dark spiral of isolation and self-fixation. 

If we are ever to surrender to God’s mercy and to the freedom God intends for us, we must, like Peter, encounter our absolute poverty and, through that encounter, entrust ourselves to God’s prodigal love for us. This self-abnegation is the death that leads to life. Paradoxically, it is only in fully experiencing our own powerlessness that we can enter into true freedom. Therein lies hope, even in the darkest times. 

Our world so desperately needs this example of freedom through poverty. I’ve been struggling to find words to describe my inner experience over the last two weeks. I’ve finally settled on the word “bereaved.” The word “bereave” comes from the Old English bereafian, meaning “to take away by violence; to seize or rob.” That seems fitting. I feel utterly bereaved—as if the world I knew and loved has been torn away from me—from us—by a violent and malevolent force. 

The truth, of course, is more complicated. Part of what has been torn away is the illusion of control and the comfort that illusion makes possible. I don’t mean there aren’t very real losses, and a seemingly endless parade of them on the horizon. I don’t have to name them—you know too well what they are. But this moment is also an apocalypse—a revelation of our poverty and powerlessness in the face of a violent malevolence that is determined to dominate and destroy. We are, collectively, faced with the reality of our total dependence upon God’s mercy. And we are challenged in our stated conviction that God brings life out of death. 

In a strange and painful way, this revelation can be the beginning of our freedom and the seed of our hope. 

On the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany in 2017 (that’s Year A for you liturgy geeks), Br. Roy Parker preached one of the most powerful sermons I have ever heard. I quote him here: 

“Jesus’ death and resurrection reveal a logic inextricably woven into the fabric of the universe. In that divine logic unjust and uncompassionate powers have reached their limits when crosses and shotguns have done their worst. They can go no further than death. But the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is that God can. 

 

When a servant of God does not cling to life in the face of a cross or a shotgun, the logic of oppressive empires and racist cultures has run its course; their power and its weapons have done all they can do. But God’s logic persists; God’s powerless weakness—whose weapons are justice and compassionate solidarity and love—continues its patient, persistent, non-violent subversion of oppressive empires and racist cultures. Jesus does not conquer Rome, but Jesus outlasts Rome.” 

When Peter chose, in the face of his own powerlessness, to surrender to God’s mercy and to follow Jesus, he did not know where that choice would lead him. He certainly stumbled along the way. Who of us hasn’t? But having surrendered himself into God’s loving care, he did not cling to a comfortable life in the face of a cross. Instead, he chose God’s powerless weakness, which is the very heart of love. 

What does this choice look like today? When praying with this morning’s gospel passage, an answer began to emerge. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and the US Government failed to respond in any meaningful way, thousands and thousands of ordinary people took to their boats. In canoes, and trawlers, and yachts they navigated that drowned city searching for survivors. They literally fished for people. And as they did so, they did not ask who anyone voted for, or how much money they made, or what they thought of various religious or social issues. In the face of devastation, their own basic humanity took over, and they worked to preserve and save whatever lives they could.

My brothers and sisters, we are called to do the same today and in the coming days and years and, let’s be honest, perhaps decades. The only way the violent and malevolent forces of this world can win, is by implanting violence and hatred in our hearts. We must resist the urge to hate our brothers and sisters, no matter how harmful their choices. Hatred may make us feel powerful for a moment, but it only shields us from the powerless freedom God invites us to: the freedom to love. We must choose love, especially when it is hardest to do so. That is the self-giving way of Jesus. That is God’s powerless weakness. That is how God saves the world. 

Take to your boats. Leave everything behind. Leave your certainties. Leave your fear. Leave the clenched fist of grief and rage clogging up your throat. Set out into the wreckage of this world to search for the lost and drowning and the dead. And when you find them, pull them up by their arms like that net of fish. Give them water to drink and a blanket to warm them. And sing them songs of God’s powerless weakness—whose weapons are mercy and love—and whose patient, persistent, non-violent mercy will outlast this violent malevolence that bereaves us. And held tight to Jesus, who will never leave us, we will, too.